Flyers (9781481414449) Read online

  Ironically, right before I spotted Emmett I’d started thinking the morning might be taking a turn for the better. My first three classes had slid by without adding any new worries to my list, and I’d managed to get in five miles on the track during my study hall. Even though track season was over and done with, I still had my permanent pass to go to gym. Running has a way of clearing my head, and I was even thinking that the next time I saw Katie, I might actually talk to her. Only now there was Emmett as large as life and standing there in all his boobocity. I knew from experience that a conversation with him could do a wicked number on my mental state.

  Emmett was listening (“active listening” is what he called it) to a couple of junior high kids. The younger kids, and even a lot of the older ones, really thought he was hot stuff because he’d “been there,” as he always put it when referring to his drug days, and I figured some of them would end up “being there” themselves so they could be just like him. I hoped the junior high kids didn’t have anything major they needed resolved because when Emmett spotted me after the pileup in the gym doorway, he jettisoned his active listening skills (which consisted of rephrasing a speaker’s words—nonjudgmentally, of course, and acting like he cared) and started giving the kids the bum’s rush.

  “I hear ya, man,” he said to the earnest-looking kid who’d been doing most of the talking. “I hear ya. Be cool.” He held up a hand to be slapped, and that slap was the last and only thing the kid got from a rapidly receding, caring but nonjudgmental Emmett.

  “Oh, God,” I said to Bo as Emmett approached. “I’m not up for this.”

  Bo laughed and lifted my arm so that my hand would meet Emmett’s hello slap.

  “Gabe, my man,” Emmett said, parlaying the slap into a hug.

  I stood there and got hugged. The only thing on me that moved was my stomach, which I could feel tightening. I knew the reason I was on Emmett’s A-list, and it made me want to punch him in the head. It so happened that Emmett had been on the scene with us a few weeks earlier when Pop had caused a commotion on Main Street. Emmett had been staying at Bo’s house that whole week because Bo was the head-honcho-captain-commander-in-chief or some such thing of our social worker Bob Chirillo’s peer leadership group, which specialized in talking about and putting on skits about drugs and drinking and suicide and other cheerful matters. The fact that Bo was even in peer leadership was strange, because in real life he’s the last guy who would sit around discussing any of these things. But Bo’s pretty much into every school activity there is—sports, band, politics (he’s class president), student council, you name it—and that’s the kind of person peer leadership recruits.

  Anyway, that whole week Emmett had been at the school talking to us—no, Emmett’s word was educating us—not only about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, but also about things like model cement and Wite-Out used “inappropriately,” and that Friday evening was the big drug awareness rally in the school auditorium. And because Emmett was the type who really got off telling everybody how far down he’d been, and how his family was dysfunctional, and how many different drugs he’d taken in his life and in what combinations, and how many times he’d woken up in alleyways in neighborhoods that were tougher and meaner than anything we’d ever seen living in a nothing-happening place like Wakefield, and because Bob Chirillo and Ray Phineas, our Barney Fife D.A.R.E. officer, were both in seventh heaven basking in Emmett’s reflected glory and whenever they could adding their own two cents worth, which generally grew into folding money, the panel discussion ran way overtime. So I didn’t get to check on Pop as early as I should have, and he overdid it at Willie’s. Charlie did manage to get Pop’s keys so he wouldn’t drive, but Pop, after a while, had set off for further adventures on foot.

  And it just so happened that right after the rally let out, Pop was coming out of the Cloud Nine tavern and, by this time, was feeling no pain. Our village’s traffic light—the only one we had unless you counted the one out by the Kmart plaza, which was technically outside the village limits—had already switched to its blinking mode for the night, and traffic was starting to back up behind the flashing red. Pop, who tended to be public-spirited with or without the inspiration of alcohol, must have thought he could be of some assistance here and waded out into the intersection and began waving his arms in the hope of getting things moving. The actual effect of this was to clog things up even more, and by the time we reached the intersection in Emmett’s Grand Am (with the personalized SAY NO plates), traffic was backed up toward the school as far as you could see. I ignored (but didn’t forget) Emmett’s head-shaking and sigh of disgust as we all saw what was going on at the intersection. Bo and I jumped out of the car, grabbed Pop, and although Emmett wasn’t exactly thrilled by the transaction, poured him into the backseat. We barely made it out of there before we saw the flashing lights of the Chief’s car trying to squeeze past the stalled traffic. Later, after we got Pop safely home and had come back into town for his car, I felt a hand on my shoulder as I started to get out of Emmett’s passenger seat. The hand was attached to Emmett. His face was twisted into the caring attitude that people like him get, and I knew he was up for some active listening. “You want to talk about it, my friend?” he said.

  And the sad thing was, from then on I was his friend. Because Pop got drunk and waved his arms around a little on Main Street, until the next evening when he returned to Albany, Emmett was stuck to me like gum on a shoe. Concerned gum.

  “Gabe, and my main man, Bo,” he said. He slapped Bo’s hand and then wrapped us both in a football huddle hug before I could step wide. “How goes it with my posse?” he said after he let us go.

  “Jim-dandy,” Bo said. “Yourself?”

  “Taking things one day at a time,” Emmett said instructively. “One day at a time.” He aimed his caring face at me. “And how’re you doing, G-man? Hanging in there?”

  “It’s Gabe,” I said.

  “You’ll make it, man,” he said, his voice dripping with reassurance. “You’re like me. You’re a survivor.”

  Before I could collect myself enough to frame a suitable response to that, Emmett clapped a hand on Bo’s shoulder and said, “Got a minute, Bo-man? We need to finalize some plans for Saturday.”

  Bo shrugged. “Well, I have English. . . .”

  Emmett gave him a drugs-take-precedence-over-that shake of the head. “Bob’ll cover you there. We gotta keep getting the message out, and to do it right we need to get busy. We wanna make sure this is the biggest thing that ever happened to this one-horse town.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, thinking that if we did only have one horse, I knew where to find its behind. I didn’t get to share this thought, though, because Emmett was already striding down the hall with Bo. As I watched them leave I was suddenly aware of a strange feeling. Lurking beneath my relief at having gotten free of Emmett so quickly was a vague but unpleasant sense that I’d been dumped as unceremoniously as the two junior high kids. For that day, at least, Emmett felt he had bigger fish to fry.

  • • •

  Emmett was gone before lunch, which was fine with me. He and his SAY NO license plates had to roll off to another school where he’d “get busy” and serve up his drug message to another captive audience. If he was lucky, they’d have more kids there who actually did drugs. And if we were lucky, they’d keep him.

  • • •

  In the cafeteria Sudie told us she’d finished patching up Rosasharn’s burnt swamp thing costume and was coming along on the other two costumes she was making—one for Jeremy, and one for Ethan. Jeremy didn’t know it yet, but Bo and I had decided that the unique chemistry that existed between Rosasharn and him made him the perfect choice to play Green Guy’s wife, Green Gal, complete with green wig, a set of oversized lips, and a couple of decent-sized breasts, courtesy of a padded bra. Ethan, making his film debut, would round out the family as their son Greenie. As long as it wasn’t a speaking part, Ethan was glad to do it, but we knew we�
�d have to handle Jeremy a little more carefully. We figured if we told him about it right away, that’d leave him enough time to rant and rave and swear up and down that he wasn’t getting into any stupid costume and making a fool of himself, especially if it meant being married to “that stupid tub,” and by Friday night his resistance would be low and we’d have him.

  When I saw Jeremy heading our way along with Rosasharn, I poked Bo. Sudie knew what was up and smiled.

  “Ah,” Rosasharn said, plunking his tray down next to Sudie’s, “the love of my life and my dear friends.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me the love of your life,” I said. “People will talk.”

  “He didn’t mean you,” Jeremy said, all indignant, as he slid onto the bench next to Rosasharn.

  I mouthed the words “It’s too easy” to Bo and he smiled. Rosasharn leaned across the table and tried to kiss me.

  “You wanna take that for me, Jeremy?” I said. “You’re closer.”

  Jeremy picked up his fork, all set to fend off Rosasharn’s lips, which had already switched directions and were heading his way. “Don’t, ya stupid tub,” he said, “unless you want a fork stuck in your head.”

  Rosasharn gave him the Curly wave-off.

  “Unrequited love makes me sad,” I said, and then realized I was only half joking.

  “You oughta know,” Jeremy told me, and was so surprised by this burst of wit that his face almost broke into a smile.

  “Speaking of affairs of the heart,” Bo said, spotting the perfect segue, “Friday night we start filming the scenes with Green Guy’s loving, dedicated, and stunningly green wife.”

  “Who’d many that tub?” Jeremy said from behind his hamburger.

  “Love’s a funny thing,” I said. “Sometimes it’s the ones you least expect who end up getting together.”

  “You know, I’ve noticed that,” Bo said. “Did you ever notice that, Jeremy?”

  At first Jeremy looked disgusted that we’d waste our breath talking about something so stupid, but then all of a sudden he stopped chewing and got a funny look on his face. When he looked over at us, we smiled at him and nodded.

  “Uh-uh,” he said, his whole body squaring off in opposition to the idea. “Uh-uh. Forget it. I ain’t doin’ it.” He went back to eating and tried to act as if he’d given the final word on the subject. Only every few minutes he’d have to look our way and announce it all over again. “I ain’t doin’ it. No way.”

  We kept smiling and nodding our heads at him. Jeremy didn’t know it yet, of course, but he was already as good as in that green wig and falsies.

  Seven

  Chow time at Blood Red Pond was a fairly predictable affair. Rosasharn and Jeremy would get a rip-roaring fire going and then proceed to cook up and finish off an almost lethal number of hot dogs and hamburgers, and then top those off with a ton or two of s’mores, which in case you don’t know, are marshmallows and chocolate melted between graham crackers over an open fire. Sudie, in what she believed to be a sensible regard for balanced nutrition, would insist they eat at least some of her macaroni or potato salad, depending on what she had made earlier that day, either of which contained enough mayo to constrict whatever small openings may have been left in their poor crud-clogged arteries. Bo was the flip side—always bringing all kinds of fresh fruit and maybe a green salad with slivered almonds or something like a fresh avocado salad, which Jeremy would always examine with exaggerated disgust, demanding to know why he didn’t eat real food.

  Ethan and I probably had it the best, being able to pick and choose from both culinary extremes as well as having plenty of our own favorites (what Jeremy called “yuppie chow”)—things like pesto pasta, Cajun shrimp, tabouli, and different ethnic foods that Pop would pick up for the weekend from Glens Falls or Saratoga or Albany, wherever business happened to take him at the end of the week. Also, Pop prided himself on having a fairly discriminating sweet tooth, and over the years he’d scouted out the area for the best of the best. That night we had éclairs and some chocolate raspberry layer cake from The Vanilla Bean in South Troy. Except for the desserts, most of what we brought rubbed Jeremy the wrong way the same as Bo’s stuff did, and this particular Friday night was no different.

  “What this?” he demanded, pulling the top off one of the containers Pop had picked up from our favorite Indian restaurant.

  “Malai kofte,” I told him, and braced myself for the assault. One of Jeremy’s specialties was matching up different foods to disgusting things they looked like. I’d become fairly resistant to this over the years, but occasionally he’d still get me by coming up with something sickening even by his standards.

  This time Jeremy decided to spread his message of good cheer around a little before zeroing in on me. His eyes flicked over to Ethan, who was sitting beside me looking through an old Superman comic. “You think Tarzan eats this crap?” he said, waving the Malai kofte at him.

  Ethan shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s Superman I like.”

  “I can just hear it,” Jeremy continued. “‘Uh, excuse me, Jane, but could you pass the Malai kofte, please?’” he said in this mincing voice.

  “It’s Indian,” Ethan explained reasonably. “And Tarzan wasn’t in India.”

  “Neither are you, but you eat it.” Jeremy waited to see if Ethan had an answer for that before turning his attention back to the Malai kofte and then to me. “You know what this looks like?” he said, and scowled some more into the container.

  “No,” I said. “But I bet you’ll tell me.”

  “Look at it,” he demanded. “It looks like calf scours. What’d you do—hold this up behind some calf that had the runs?” He made a farty kind of noise and held the container out for a mock fill-up.

  I rolled my eyes and grabbed the thing from him. “Did you get dropped on your head as a baby?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad. It might’ve done you some good.”

  “At least I don’t eat calf scours.”

  “Calf scours?” Rosasharn said, looking up from the other side of a rack of hamburgers he’d rigged up over the fire. “And why wasn’t I told you were bringing something so scrumptileeicious?”

  Without meaning to, I found myself looking at the Malai kofte in my hands. It had always been one of my favorite things, but now, thanks to Jeremy, I was seeing it in a whole new light. It was lumpy and brownish yellow and did look a little like calf scours, now that he pointed it out.

  Meanwhile Jeremy had whipped the cover off the Navratan korma, which is mixed vegetables and Indian cheese in a cream sauce. His nose was giving it a good going-over, and then he made like he was throwing up into it. “Look,” he said, holding it out. “Chunks.”

  That did it. I almost gagged. It wasn’t just Jeremy’s skill as a gross-out artist that got me. My appetite had been taking a nosedive all week, like it always does when I fall head over heels for a girl. That pining-away feeling I had for Katie had continued to grow each day until I was well on the road to being a basket case. Looking back on it, my whole week had been like something out of The Twilight Zone. In addition to the mental agony, a fair amount of roughness had been seeping onto my physical plane as well. For starters, I was losing stuff left and right. My Adidas turned up missing on Wednesday, a rugby shirt on Thursday, and some money I had lying around just that morning. Not only that, but strange things were happening in our refrigerator too. Stuff that I was the only one in the whole house who ate was disappearing from one day to the next, and I didn’t remember eating it. I didn’t even remember having a decent enough appetite to want to eat it. I’ve always been absentminded but this was getting out of hand. My mind was out taking a walk around the block.

  “Eat it if you think it’s so good,” Jeremy ordered, thrusting the Navratan korma he’d been entertaining himself with farther under my chin and studying me with his gestapo face.

  “Or perhaps you’d like to wrap yon face around yon former cow,” Rosasharn said, coming at
me with the sizzling burger rack, “and save yon barf and calf scours for dessert.”

  I tried not to but must have looked a little green as the burger fumes hit my nostrils. “Maybe later,” I said as casually as I could manage.

  “All right,” Jeremy said. “Who is it this time?” He’d finally sat down and was scowling at me from across the fire.

  I scowled back at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Cut the crap. Whenever you sit around looking pitiful like that and won’t eat, it always means you’ve gone stupid over some girl again.”

  I couldn’t believe he’d nailed it like that. I looked around. Everybody else was studying me now, even Ethan, whose face had come up out of his comic book. Bo shrugged. I’d already told him about Katie Lyons, and it’s always that much harder to lie if even one person knows you’re lying. Especially if that person is an honest one.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “All right,” I said after a while. “But this doesn’t go any farther than here. You understand?” I gave Jeremy the eye, and then Rosasharn.

  Rosasharn went through the motions of zipping his lips and throwing away the key. Jeremy didn’t feel it necessary to make any deals. “Just tell us, Gabe-boy.” He deliberately ran the two words together so it sounded like “Gay boy.”

  I took a breath. “It’s Katie Lyons. She’s a freshman.”

  “Katie Lyons!” Sudie practically screamed. “I know her! She’s been best friends with Heather Lutz ever since they were in first grade. Heather lives right down the street from me. I see her walking past my house every day!”

  “Oh, boy,” Jeremy said. “She walks past your house.”

  My heart sank to a record low. Heather was the one I’d seen giving me the once-over earlier in the week.

  “I can put in a good word for you,” Sudie said. “I’ve known Heather for forever.”